Dating 9 - 5

Name: Work
What it is: The place where you show up every day and do stuff in exchange for money
Cost: Free – actually, they pay you to be there!
Random fact: According to The Office Life web site (http://www.theofficelife.com/work-dating-office-romance.html), “a recent survey of 610 working men and women by vaultreports.com showed that 58% of people claimed to have had a workplace relationship, and a surprising 23% admitted to having ‘relations’ on office property.” (Makes you think twice before touching anything in the supply closet, doesn’t it?)
The scoop: I know they say lots of couples meet at work, but if I were counting on my job to supply my social life, I wouldn’t have had a date since 1998. I’ve only been asked out by a co-worker twice, and I only actually went out with one of them – a pretty low number, considering I’m 35 years old and have had a TON of jobs (staying at each one for only a year or two). And both of those co-workers were fellow teachers -- kind of funny, considering the stereotype about 90% of teachers being female. (Middle schools actually have a more even ratio of male to female teachers, in my experience). When I was in my twenties, my single young co-workers had no interest in me, and the rest of my co-workers were at least ten years older. Now that I’m in my thirties, the co-workers in my age group are either already married or gay, and the others are at least ten years younger!

My dates: I’ll call the first guy, simply, the Lonely Man, because I think he was. We met right after I moved to South Texas as a naïve 23-year-old, ready to save the world by teaching eighth grade English. He’d moved there years earlier from some other state and was teaching gifted/talented English to sixth, seventh and eighth graders. A few of us teachers went out to dinner one night, and although Lonely Man was a little strange and didn’t smile much, I learned that he played classical guitar, which was cool. He was also in his 40s – twenty years older than I was.

In the teachers’ lounge a few days later, one of my female co-workers casually asked, “How old a guy would you consider dating?”

Having no idea where she was coming from, I said, “I probably wouldn’t go more than ten years older.”

“So, 43 is too old, then?”

I said yes. She looked pensive. “I feel really awkward about this,” she said, awkwardly, “but Lonely Man likes you and he wanted me to ask you if you’re interested in him. But I know he’s too old for you.”

That’s really how it happened. It was so junior high, you would’ve thought we were the students, not the teachers! But, he was only the third guy who’d ever asked me out in my entire life (the other two had been two years earlier, in college, and neither of those relationships had lasted very long), so I was still flattered. After school that day, as I posted my students’ work on the walls of the trailer that was my classroom, Lonely Guy came around. We made small talk for a bit, and he finally said if I’d be interested in doing something one night.... Because I was nervous, I cut him off by blurting out, “Sure! That’d be fun!” even though I had no romantic interest in him.

He said okay. But the weird thing was, he never actually asked me out after that. A couple months later, he actually made plans with my roommate (only two years older than I was) to attend a concert. But when she got a strange vibe from him, she said, “We’re just going as friends, right?” He said, “Yes, because I know you wouldn’t go otherwise.” Sufficiently weirded out, she cancelled on him.

A couple months later, I ended up even more relieved that Lonely Man and I had never gotten together when a group of us met for dinner, and he talked about some sort of pest that was being a nuisance in his yard – maybe groundhogs? And he proceeded to tell us all proudly that he had taken to trapping the animals and drowning them in his bathtub. !!! I was horrified. I’ve always thought drowning has to be one of the worst ways to go, whether you’re a person or an animal. It was extraordinarily creepy.

I moved away a couple years later, and a few years after that, I learned that Lonely Man had died. :O Yes. He had moved to a bigger city to take a new teaching job – surprising, because he’d lived in that small South Texas town for so long, I thought he’d retire there – and the rumor was that he had killed himself. :( I felt a little guilty at first. If I had dated him, maybe he wouldn’t have committed suicide. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s really, really, REALLY not a good reason to date somebody.

Tomorrow I’ll post about the other guy I met at work – whom I’ve actually (according to him) been dating for ten years (!). Stay tuned....